


Natural Sympathies

by myfortuneandterrorandrapture



Category: The Blacklist (TV)
Genre: F/M, First Time, Post Tom's death, SAPPY i fully admit, Slow Build, Slow Burn, if you want to see the last five seasons as the buildup to this then
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-12
Updated: 2018-04-12
Packaged: 2019-04-21 19:51:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,012
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14292189
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/myfortuneandterrorandrapture/pseuds/myfortuneandterrorandrapture
Summary: After five years, its time Elizabeth Keen and Donald Ressler admitted their feelings for each other.





	Natural Sympathies

            Liz Keen did not want to be alone this night. She was tired of the lies and the revenge and the hate she had let consume her. She wanted to see Agnes, but that was out of the question right now. She didn’t have friends outside of the task force and she didn’t have family outside of Red. She couldn’t see Cooper, he wasn’t exactly a drinking buddy, and Liz had a feeling that was exactly what she wanted to do tonight. Aram and Samar were on a date tonight; she heard them talking earlier. That left Ressler, her first choice, though she was desperately trying to convince herself otherwise.  

            He welcomed her in, and handed her a beer as he sat next to her on the couch. Once she had it in her hands, though, the desire to drink inexplicably left her. She wanted her mind to be clear for this. For what she was lying to herself about.

            They sat in silence for a while, not needing to say anything, while the nightly news played faintly in front of them. After half-heartedly sipping her beer, she turned to face him.  

            “ I don’t think I’ve ever asked, how long have you been in this apartment?”

            “Almost four years. I couldn’t stay in my old one, not after…” He trailed off, unable to continue.

            “How do you move on from that? I don’t know how. I don’t know what I’m doing anymore.”

            He looked back at her. He thought often how similar their lives had ended up, parallel in ways. And sometimes about how if Audrey had survived instead of him, she would be here like Liz, alone with just a child to remember their partner by. But life had robbed him of both Audrey and their child, and yet life continued to be lived.

            “One day you wake up and it hits you that they’re really not coming back. You realize you didn’t dream about them – either alive or dead - the night before. And you realize that hate is a pretty shitty way to repay their love.” He shifted toward her, holding her gaze. “You _know_ that I know how you feel. And I know that you can’t control how you feel, not at a time like this. But you’re the strongest person I know, and you’re going to be ok.”

            “You’re right about how I feel. But you’re right that hate gets you nowhere. And I don’t want to hate anymore. I… I want to love.”

 

            His heart skipped a beat from her telling intensity. He didn’t know whether to question her or not. She moved, ever so slightly, toward him and he didn’t break eye contact, didn’t move away. She noticed his chest rising and falling just a little bit faster than it had been. There was a chrysalis around this moment, and they had to be careful not to shatter it. She moved the rest of the way toward him, and he still didn’t move, even when her nose brushed his. She waited, wanting him to complete what she had started, and he shifted subtly toward her, yet it was too small of a movement. But she wasn’t going to let this moment slip away, and so the moment shattered. At the last second, he had turned his head completely away, eyes shut.

            She felt confused, and for the lack of a better term, heartbroken. She had expected too much, read things wrong. Her profiler mind had failed her again. She stood up quickly to go, muttering that she was sorry, really sorry.

            She hadn’t gotten to the door before she heard him asking her to wait. She turned to see him standing as well, hands half raised in a defeated position. He looked sadder than she had seen him in a long time.

            “I’ve thought we’ve lost you… a lot of times by now. And each time… each time it happens, it doesn’t get any easier for me to handle. It gets harder. Every time I think _this time it’s for real_. _Luck’s run out._ And I don’t know how I could… if I could survive that, not if… not after I told you I’m in love you.”

            She smiled. There was a bit of sadness, of disbelief, of pain in her eyes, but her smile was happy, radiant. He loved her smile, one that still showed pure joy at life and its possibilities, no matter how much she had endured since they had met. And right now the smile was directed at him. At their possibilities.

            “How long have you been in love with me?”

            “ I think I first admitted it to myself after your funeral. Fake funeral. I can’t explain to you what that day was like for us. It was… like Cooper lost a daughter, and Aram… you know him, he was a mess. The way Samar reacted when she found out it was all a lie… that showed her hand more than she would admit.” He slowly began walking toward her.” But for me… I’m not the type to … be emotional, I know you know me well enough for that. But my training… it went out the window then. I wasn’t mourning you as my partner… not even as a friend."

            He had reached her now. He lifted his hand to tangle his fingers in her hair and brush her cheek with his thumb. Her breath caught. For this to be coming from Ressler - it was an intimacy too foreign and tender to process at first.

            “It was a lot longer than that, you know… before you were a fugitive. If there was something specific, I think it was after Alaska. I was so fucking weak then, but you stayed with me. I know I haven’t always done the same for you… and I’m sorry.”

            Somehow, she knew all this already, at some level. She had seen it in his eyes all these years… but to hear him say it, really say it… And she hadn’t just seen him at his weakest, she had seen him at his worst - a stubborn, angry bully – and he had seen her at her weakest and worst… and yet… and yet…

            “Are you going to kiss me or what?”

            It was his turn to smile ( _a “sudden sunlight” smile_ , she thought, _like Elizabeth Gaskell wrote)_ as he leaned toward her. His lips caught hers with all the controlled force she knew he would have. They didn’t break the kiss until her back hit a wall. She gasped for breath, more from the pressure and heat of his body against hers than from the jolt to her spine.

 

            They stood there, staring into each other's eyes for a few moments, each memorizing the face they already knew so well and recognizing this point of no return they had just crossed. She kissed him this time, rolling into the pressure his body held on her.

            “Liz,” he moaned against her lips, relishing the name on his. Yes, she was Liz to him now, not Keen. _Keen_ was a harsh word, a word spit out of the corner of his mouth. It had been easy to call her Keen back when he hadn’t trusted her, at the times she broke his trust; it was a lie of a word at its very core. _Liz_ was softer, a pleasant vibration drawn out to savor it’s sound.

            Their kisses were lighter and quicker now, but more ravenous, as if the heat from any prolonged contact would burn them. But it didn’t last – hands pressed each other closer, ran over each other, feeling every curve.

            She couldn’t think of him as Ressler right now either. _Ressler_ was the formality, the agent with the rulebook, the Fed that had hunted her, threatened to shoot her. She had watched him break then, his gun pointed at her face; watched the humanity he tried to hide take over. She had surrendered, not out of fear of his threats but because his voice told her he wouldn’t hurt her – she was hurting him. And that was the last thing she had wanted. That must have been when she first started to fall in love with him, though Tom and their history had eclipsed him for a long time. Maybe it had been the morning she woke up in a cell, the smell of him on the jacket he had lent her as a pillow. He was still sitting outside her cage - unmoved, eyes puffy with his lack of sleep - protecting her at real risk to his life. Maybe it was further back, when he wouldn’t let her be alone for her birthday. It didn’t matter when it had started; all that mattered was that now he was everything.

            “Don,” she tried out this word. It fit, spoken on her sighing breath. It was everything kind and selfless in him, this man with the potential to give so much to save others, who had sacrificed much more than she sometimes remembered.

            Their hands, no longer content to explore each other while fabric separated them, began undoing buttons, pulling off layers. She giggled in the midst of a kiss, when his hand got caught in a sleeve cuff that was still buttoned. Like her smile, her laugh brought out a fierce happiness and protective desire in him. She was too smart and brave and sunny to have had to live through the pain she had already suffered in her life, and he wanted to make sure she was only happy from then on.

 

            He led her to the bedroom as they finished undressing. The cold winter air seeping in from the closing windows tingled against their burning bodies.

            He was strong enough to lift her up and lay her gently down on the bed, him hovering inches above her. Liz reached up to stroke his face, to push his damp hair off his forehead. One more moment passed, both afraid of breaking a spell, waking from a dream. This was it. There was no going back and neither of them wanted to.

            They fit together in a way so natural that it surprised them both. But it shouldn’t have, really. They already knew each other better than most couples ever would – they had been through too much together, suffered too much side by side. Through they weren’t quite aware, it was this sharing of something beautiful - so rare for them both separately and together – that surprised them. That they were here together in spite of - or perhaps because of – what they had been through.

            As they finished, they both felt some part of their souls, thought dead or lost, had been found, reawakened, completed. Something now made sense in a world that made so little sense. They lay side by side, drifting semi-conscious, wondering why they had wasted so much precious time feigning obliviousness to the obvious.

            He leaned over to kiss her, but she pulled away, her face serious.

            “ Ressler, I have to come clean about something. I wouldn’t feel right after this if I didn’t tell you, if I kept hiding this from you…”

            He looked at her, brows furrowed. He felt fear for another buried secret, another hidden lie, another way her father’s world would tear them apart. He was afraid he would lose her already.

            “Liz, you can tell me. What is it?” He kept his voice as steady as he could.

            “I hope this doesn’t freak you out or anything but,” she took a deep breath, “I’m a single mother. Yep, that’s right I have a kid.” She was smiling before she even finished speaking, unable to keep up the pretense even for a full minute.

            He smiled too, and a chuckle escaped. This was a woman who could pretend to be a hundred people, keep a thousand secrets, tell a million lies, but she couldn’t make a single joke without giving herself away.

            “If you think that’s going to keep me away from you, you’re very wrong,” he said, kissing the laughing Liz.

**Author's Note:**

> Title is a reference to Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte.


End file.
